Exploring the Immediate Effects of COVID-19 Containment Policies on Crime: an Empirical Analysis of the Short-Term Aftermath in Los Angeles

This work investigates whether and how COVID-19 containment policies had an immediate impact on crime trends in Los Angeles. The analysis is conducted using Bayesian structural time-series and focuses on nine crime categories and on the overall crime count, daily monitored from January 1st 2017 to March 28th 2020. We concentrate on two post-intervention time windows—from March 4th to March 16th and from March 4th to March 28th 2020—to dynamically assess the short-term effects of mild and strict policies. In Los Angeles, overall crime has significantly decreased, as well as robbery, shoplifting, theft, and battery. No significant effect has been detected for vehicle theft, burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, intimate partner assault, and homicide. Results suggest that, in the first weeks after the interventions are put in place, social distancing impacts more directly on instrumental and less serious crimes. Policy implications are also discussed.

Checkmate to Bioethics?

Bioethics, as the first cousin of philosophy, suffers from what philosopher Hegel told us during his lifetime, “When philosophy paints lights and shadows, an aspect of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated, but only understood. Minerva’s owl takes flight only during sundown”. The problem is how to fight an invisible opponent. What to do when your opponent enters your body and kills you from the inside? This pandemic has taken away out trust in the “Other,” even if they are our parents or children, since it turns a simple act of love —a kiss or a hug— into a deadly weapon. No one, not the richest nor the poorest country, was prepared for this. The covid-19 pandemic has put the world in check and proposes a new planetary order. Bioethics must take its most reflective streak, understand the phenomenon, and draw lessons from this heartbreaking experience so that we do not make the same mistakes again that are costing us so many bitter tears and deaths. I will present in this editorial some points that may help us to continue the debate and possibly reach agreements on how to advance in a post-COVID-19 world. Readers will find too and editorial note on our journals' numeration system. In the name of the editorial board of Revista Latinoamericana de Bioética and my own, we dedicate this issue to the heroes of this pandemic, the health professionals (doctors, nurses, para- medics, to name just a few) who have risked their lives for the most vulnerable and feeble, those who have suffered the agony of this utterly heartless coronavirus disease.

Exploring the Effects of COVID-19 Containment Policies on Crime: An Empirical Analysis of the Short-term Aftermath in Los Angeles

This work investigates whether and how COVID-19 containment policies had an immediate impact on crime trends in Los Angeles. The analysis is conducted using Bayesian structural time-series and focuses on nine crime categories and on the overall crime count, daily monitored from January 1st 2017 to March 28th 2020. We concentrate on two post-intervention time windows—from March 4th to March 16th and from March 4\textsuperscript{th} to March 28th 2020—to dynamically assess the short-term effects of mild and strict policies. In Los Angeles, overall crime has significantly decreased, as well as robbery, shoplifting, theft, and battery. No significant effect has been detected for vehicle theft, burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, intimate partner assault, and homicide. Results suggest that, in the first weeks after the interventions are put in place, social distancing impacts more directly on instrumental and less serious crimes. Policy implications are also discussed.

Biochemists' bliss: harnessing the power of snake toxins to treat cardiovascular diseases

Deadly snake venom can be turned into life-saving therapeutics. Currently, several medicinal agents approved by the US Food and Drug Administration originated from snake venom. These include captopril, used to treat high blood pressure, as well as eptifibatide and tirofiban, used as bloodthinning agents to prevent thrombosis (clotting of blood in the circulation). Many other snake venom toxins have also been made into reagents that help to diagnose different kinds of blood disorders. Here, we discuss the molecular basis of how snake venom affects components in blood to unveil secrets behind the deadly weapon that can be harnessed for its power of healing.

HIV on Trial

After the first successful conviction of an HIV-positive person in Michigan, the number of criminal cases quickly grew throughout the 1990s. In this chapter, I go inside the courtroom to show how courts justify their often-harsh sentences by calling HIV-positive defendants murderers and by casting HIV as a deadly weapon. I draw on an original dataset including court transcripts from over one hundred criminal court cases in Michigan and Tennessee that led to convictions. Even in cases in which the defendant could not have plausibly infected their partner, judges scold defendants for being a deadly threat to society. The various intricacies of each case seem to matter little—suggesting that HIV, not the defendant, was on trial.

Semiotika Desain Oblong Dagadu Djokdja

In the name of fun and being made without any burden the product of Dagadu Djokdja freely rockets in the air, and yet keep staying on the earth. The uniqueness as well as the strength of this product is, firstly, that it gives aesthetic to the daily subject, simple, even trivial, and sometimes, forgotten already. For that reason the design section counts on the graphic design aspect as its deadly weapon in order to convey and to reveal the approved themes. Secondly, it emphasizes the aspect of specific graphic design by joining the localism, humor, and the sense on fun into the pop art world in order to create attractiveness as the selling point of the product. Thirdly, it chooses the manufacture image instead of craft, both by material and by any other graphic design element. Fourthly, the distinctiveness as well the characteristic of all T-shirt designs of Dagadu Djokdja are the use of poster approach (poster style).